Knitting, Biking and Some Sober Second Thoughts

$5 in Paris: à laver la tête d’un âne, on perd sa lessive

You know how there was that one member of Destiny's Child who always had to wear the one sleeve thing? This isn't like that at all.

Now that I’m back on Canadian soil, I can say that my first trip taking knitting in my carry-on (or, as I like to refer to it, Operation Please Don’t Confiscate My Sweater) was a huge success. I got a ton of knitting done. I don’t know why I wasn’t doing this ages ago.

I like to be early for things, especially flights, and since I was taking public transit to the airport, I left super-duper extra-early. I got to the check in just over three hours before my flight left, which is technically the time they recommend you be there, but just so you know, they do not actually even have the check-in counters open yet. Fortunately I had no luggage to check, so I just used the machine to get my boarding pass, beat the crowd to security and breezed through customs. I was seated at the gate ~2.5 hours before my flight was due to leave.

Needless to say that gave me a great starting point for knitting, both before boarding and during the flight, although I started getting worried during the flight because there wasn’t really space to wriggle into my sweater and check the sizing as I went, so I had to keep knitting and hope it would be okay. In the end I think I did the waist shaping decreases too quickly: the pattern says every five rounds, which seemed way too infrequent to me so I did every three; next time I would split the difference and do every four. Also, I threw in three sets of short rows and I thought that if I combined the decrease row with the row after the two short turns then I could save having to do any funny wrapping or picking up of stitches and just do k2tog/ssk where the gaps were, but for some reason this didn’t work and I’m left with a bit of a hole:

Ewwwwww

I’m still not quite sure why this is. I do it all the time with sock heel turns and that seems to go okay. Is it the yarn weight or does the shape of the heel turn make it less noticeable? I didn’t rip it back though because I’m on vacation so whatevs (hence the post title). It basically almost fits. Close enough!

Anyway, knitting was great. I didn’t care that I had a long wait at the gate. I didn’t care when we hit turbulence. I almost didn’t even care that the woman beside me smelled pretty bad, although that was starting to make me a bit sick by the end. None of it mattered since, after the flight there, I had a sweater that was about 3/4 complete. I think they should actually encourage everyone to knit on flights; people would stress way less. Sitting in the airport for my flight home (for which I was again really early because my sister’s flight was before mine and I got dropped off with her), I could hear families fighting around me, having (I assume) finished their vacation in Florida, where it was gorgeous weather all week, the stress of travelling was getting to them. “No we board at 2:10. It says right on the ticket.” “Well, I just asked her and she said 2:40. We’re delayed an hour. Go check yourself if you want.”…”I checked we board at 2:10. You want to fight about it some more? I love fighting.”

Now, if these people knit, I could just lean over and say “Hey guys, don’t worry. If we’re delayed an hour then I might be able to finish this sweater before I get home. Isn’t that great?! Well, not the sweater. I mean the sweater’s okay, but it’s my first sweater and I think I kind of messed up the fit a bit and there are these holes where the short rows are, see? But I can fix that up when I weave in the ends. Aren’t the colours great though? It’s great yarn. It’s acrylic. Crazy right. I mean, you can still tell. I’m nor a fibre snob or anything and I can tell, but it’s not bad and it’ll be machine washable. So, yeah, I’m starting to think I could really finish this up on the flight today.” But then the part of my brain that is still capable of interacting with non-knitters suggested they might not actually find any of this helpful or comforting. But if everyone knit on the flight, well, they would be thrilled with the extra time to finish their own projects, wouldn’t they?

I finished the body (may go back and do more ribbing? I intentionally did less than called for because I was worried it would be too long since I already have two extra stripes, but a couple more rows might be better) and most of one sleeve on the homeward wait/flight, but I didn’t want to start the sleeve ribbing until I could try it on to test the length. I think two more stripes will be too long, but right now might be too short, so I’m not sure what to do. Anyway, I’ll probably have something I consider finished by next week. Hopefully I can get those holes patched up.

With the needles sticking out at odd angles, I guess it's a bit less Destiny's Child and a bit more Locutus of Borg. Although my pyjama pants are nicer than his.

The length of the sweater looks great to me. I wouldn’t add more ribbing. Knitting keeps me sane in all kinds of waiting and time-wasting scenarios. Makes me feel like I’m using the time productively and provides me with some distraction!

A blog about knitting, biking, movies and books although I can’t keep up with new releases and I like to overthink things for a month or seven. I’m also finishing up my PhD but it’s taking a long time, so it’s probably best if we don’t talk about that. Currently living in Toronto.